About 12 years ago, I registered the domain name ANIMALBOY.COM with the intention of hosting a series of transcribed interviews with my son as a type of "Kids Say The Most Fucked Up Things" microsite.

Our niche would be the organisms my son regularly sketched on the back of junk mail envelopes; our format classic Frost / Nixon (as reprinted in Time Magazine); and our mission to broadcast our message to every Tom, Dick and Henrietta on Planet Earth, Gliese 581 and Universe A.

On Tuesday, January 11, 2005—the anniversary of Albert Hoffman first synthesizing LSD— we dropped Eraser on an unsuspecting world, and closed out the week with similar truth bombs on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

To ensure our identies would not be compromised, we prepared for our first week online by stockpiling carbs, coffee and candy in our Sowebo rowhouse basement (with a little bucket behind the dryer for when nature called). We took turns peeking through the curtain facing the street, fully expecting to see people—from the waist down—losing their shit.

When none of that came to pass, we nursed the Loud Wrong with junk food, cranked up some Hawkwind, powered down the WONKA sign and re-evaluated our niche.

"So what do you think, buddy? Should we expand our scope to target humans, too?"

My son responded non-verbally (trait of a genius, natch) by whipping off a portrait of the Founding Father on the back of a Capital 666 Yoke Card Application. We decided to formalize the structure of the interview this time instead of winging it, and set the inducement day for our Million Dollar Baby to coincide with the 77th Annual Academy Awards. When Clint Eastwood took the prize for Best Picture, we took it as a sign that we were on the right path.

Or not. The next day we walked away from our venture completely.

Be-bah-duh-be-bah-duh, that's all folks.

As Picasso famously admitted, it took him four years to paint like Raphael, "but a lifetime to paint like a child." The operative word here is like.

The ability to draw is more-or-less innate to children (for those who can see and who have functioning hands) and it doesn't take much coaxing for them to start practicing the dark art of visual transcription. In the hand of a child, a pencil is a magic wand. So it's not a tough sell.

I have deep respect for my adult friends—both artists and not—who are able to draw "like a child" because, in my estimation, the ability to do so is predicated on tapping into a zen state of non-judgement and acceptance. While any artist can be a loathesome pig in "real life", it's nearly impossible to be that way and stay in the moment at the same time. Douchebaggery tends to manifest post-coitally, when the rubbing or prodding is complete.

The original impetus for doing Animal Boy (other than my own vanity) was to shine a spotlight on my son's ability to express himself and to gently interrogate him about his philosophy of life (and have a few laughs in the process). I may have also been influenced by Paul West's "Words for a Deaf Daughter" (1970), a non-fiction account of his relationship to his daughter that incorporates many doodles and photographs.

As every parent knows (and my apologies for using that annoying expression), your child is only ever on loan to you. There is no color-coded threat level for coming of age, but if there were, the top slot would be infrared, a radiant energy only "visible" (as heat) to rattlesnakes, pythons and certain charismatic preachers.

So no matter how much the thought gives you pause, the reality is that the compact wonderbox sitting at the kitchen table—the little girl focused intently on a locust shell, the little boy guiding an ant along a piece of yarn—is going to walk out your door one day.

Resistance is futile. "But for someone you adore", as the Mamas and Papas point out, "it's a pleasure to be sad."

It's rather absurd for me to dissect a decade-old online goof as if it were worthy of your attention. But if you have read this far—not merely nibbling on the throbbing sidebar candy and moving on—then maybe it is a contender, if only in my mind and heart.

When my collaborator on Animal Boy departed for college last year, the server hosting the site did not throw confetti into the air. It beeped and booped like it always has done, dutifully delivering the same content over an HTTP connection to the handful of Ramones fans and rough-and-ready boys looking for that perfect community domain name.

The previous (and only other) version of the site is accessible to the curious through the Wayback Machine, and if you take a look at that indexed version, you will see a site that was pleasingly minimal in its presentation: a locked-in-place illustration and a question-and-answer content area for each of the five pieces my son and I put up for public consumption. I'm not ashamed of the original version of the site, but it has always felt vaguely unfinished to me, largely because it came and went (into the bowels of time) so quickly.

When your dog is old and feable, when medicine cannot do anything but prolong a diminished suffering, you've reached the point where your pet has to be put down. And in the case of Animal Boy, that time has come.

The difference represented in Animal Boy 2.0 (gag) is a deconstruction of the conversation through inline image commentary. In other words, I've hired myself as a funeral cosmetician, but one authorized to draw happy faces on the cadaver's forehead by explicit request (my own).

"Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone."
--Jorge Luis Borges

"There isn't time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that."
-- Mark Twain